Remembrance day essays

In “We Bring Fear,” his last piece for Mother Jones , he told the story of Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, a Mexican journalist fleeing north for his life, not from the cartels per se, but the Mexican Army units working with them. In “ The Sicario ,” his last piece for Harper’s (edited by the amazing John Jeremiah Sullivan Bill Wasik), he told the tale of a former cartel hit man who’d dismember and bathe people in acid while keeping them alive via adrenaline shots just to torture them a bit more. There was the story for Esquire where he attempted to and largely succeeded in redeeming Gary Webb, the journalist who came under attack after claiming the CIA had aided inner-city drug dealers in a ploy to help fund the Contras. (Despite that piece and others vindicating much of his reporting, Webb killed himself, something that Bowden never got over.)